DETAILED ACTION
Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
Response to Arguments
Applicant’s arguments with respect to claim(s) 14-25 have been considered but are moot because the new ground of rejection does not rely on any reference applied in the prior rejection of record for any teaching or matter specifically challenged in the argument.
The 101 rejection has been withdrawn.
While the previous Denton rejection is withdrawn, Applicant’s arguments are not persuasive. A class label such as “a bird” reads on a semantic representation which comprises one or more labels (in this case “bird”) of the one or more pixels (the image).
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 112
The following is a quotation of the first paragraph of 35 U.S.C. 112(a):
(a) IN GENERAL.—The specification shall contain a written description of the invention, and of the manner and process of making and using it, in such full, clear, concise, and exact terms as to enable any person skilled in the art to which it pertains, or with which it is most nearly connected, to make and use the same, and shall set forth the best mode contemplated by the inventor or joint inventor of carrying out the invention.
The following is a quotation of the first paragraph of pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112:
The specification shall contain a written description of the invention, and of the manner and process of making and using it, in such full, clear, concise, and exact terms as to enable any person skilled in the art to which it pertains, or with which it is most nearly connected, to make and use the same, and shall set forth the best mode contemplated by the inventor of carrying out his invention.
Claims 14-25 and 32 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(a) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), first paragraph, as failing to comply with the written description requirement. The claim(s) contains subject matter which was not described in the specification in such a way as to reasonably convey to one skilled in the relevant art that the inventor or a joint inventor, or for applications subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, the inventor(s), at the time the application was filed, had possession of the claimed invention.
Claim 14 recites “using two or more discriminators to compare the two or more different resolution versions of the second image to two or more different resolution versions of an original image used to generate the first image ”
The Examiner is unable to find support for these limitations. Applicant did not show where these claim are supported.
The disclosure (see below) does discuss
It is not clear what Applicant means by “generating two or more different resolution versions of a second image based, at least in part ,on the semantic representation”.
While the disclosure does disclose a first, second and third discriminator, It does not disclose “2 or more” (two or more includes the numbers 4, 5, 6 etc).
Additionally, which the scope of claim 14 includes each discriminator comparing 2 or more resolution versions of the second image with 2 or more resolution versions of an original image.. This is additionally not contemplated by the original disclosure. Modifying the claim by using the word, “respectively“ with proper editing, might correct the issue. See paragraphs 29-30, 166-168, which clearly shows a 1-to-1 mapping.
Claim 14 recites “generating the image using the one or more neural networks, wherein one or more parameters of the one or more neural networks are updated based, at least in part, on an output from at least one of the two or more discriminators.”
The Examiner is unable to find support for these limitations. Applicant did not show where these claim are supported.
The word parameter appears only once, in paragraph 146.
Claim 20 is rejected under similar reasoning as claim 14.
Claims 15-19,21 -25 and 32 are rejected as dependent upon a rejected claim.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 103 which forms the basis for all obviousness rejections set forth in this Office action:
A patent for a claimed invention may not be obtained, notwithstanding that the claimed invention is not identically disclosed as set forth in section 102, if the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which the claimed invention pertains. Patentability shall not be negated by the manner in which the invention was made.
Claim(s) 14-18,32 and 20-23 and 25 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Isola (“Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks”) in view of Denton (“Deep Generative Image Models using a Laplacian Pyramid of Adversarial Networks”)
Isola- discloses 14. (Original) One or more processors, comprising:
circuitry to use one or more neural networks to generate an image by
receiving a semantic representation comprising one or more labels of one or more pixels; (Isola, Fig. 2, shows the real image and the semantic representation)
generating (Isola, Fig.2, Negative example)
using (Isola, Fig. 2, Negative example)
generating the image using the one or more neural networks, wherein one or more of the parameters of then one or more neural networks are updated based, at least in part, on an output from at least one of the two or more discriminators (Isola,Fig. 1 show generating an output image based on a semantic representation, which has been trained using the method shown in Fig. 2)
Isola discloses the claimed invention at only a single resolution, thus does not disclose multiple resolutions.
Denton discloses a multi-resolution processing using two or more descriminators
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It would have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art before the time of the effective filing date of the claimed invention of the instant application to use the multi-resolution structure of Denton in place of the single resolution structure of Isola.
The suggestion/motivation for doing so would have been improved image quality and scalability. (See Denton, section 5 discussion)
Further, one skilled in the art could have combined the elements as described above by known methods with no change in their respective functions, and the combination would have yielded nothing more than predictable results.
Therefore, it would have been obvious to combine Isola with Denton to obtain the invention as specified in claim 14.
Isola in view of Denton discloses 15. (Currently Amended) The one or more processors of claim 14, wherein the circuitry is further to:use a neural network to generate the two or more different resolution versions of the second image (Denton Fig. 2, G0, G1, G2, G3)
Isola in view of Denton discloses 16. (Currently Amended) The one or more processors of claim 14, wherein the circuitry is further to:obtain a set of features, wherein the set of features indicate one or more characteristics of the second image; and cause the one or more neural networks to process the set of features to generate the image. (Denton, Fig. 2, “For CIFAR10, we also explore a class conditional version of the model, where a vector c encodes the label. This is integrated into Gk & Dk by passing it through a linear layer whose output is reshaped into a single plane feature map which is then concatenated with the 1st layer maps.”)
Isola in view of Denton discloses 17. (Currently Amended) The one or more processors of claim 16, wherein the circuitry is further to generate the set of features using one or more encoders. (Denton, Fig. 2, “For CIFAR10, we also explore a class conditional version of the model, where a vector c encodes the label. This is integrated into Gk & Dk by passing it through a linear layer whose output is reshaped into a single plane feature map which is then concatenated with the 1st layer maps.”)
Isola in view of Denton discloses 18. (Currently Amended) The one or more processors of claim 14, wherein the semantic representation comprises a semantic label map (Isola, Fig. 1)
Isola in view of Denton discloses 32. (New) The processor of claim 14, wherein the second image comprises a lower resolution than the first image.(see claim 15)
Claim 20 is rejected under similar grounds as claim 14.
Claim 21 is rejected under similar grounds as claim 15.
Claim 22 is rejected under similar grounds as claim 16.
Claim 23 is rejected under similar grounds as claim 17, where the pooling layer is part of the generator.
Claim 25 is rejected under similar grounds as claim 15, where there are 2 GANs. Each GAN is a neural network.
Isola in view of Denton discloses 32. (Currently Amended) The processor of claim 14, wherein the one or more neural networks comprise a generator to generate the image. (See claim 14)
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 103 which forms the basis for all obviousness rejections set forth in this Office action:
A patent for a claimed invention may not be obtained, notwithstanding that the claimed invention is not identically disclosed as set forth in section 102, if the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which the claimed invention pertains. Patentability shall not be negated by the manner in which the invention was made.
Claim(s) 19 and 24 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Isola in view of Denton in view of Lee(PGPUb 2019/0147582).
Isola in view of Denton discloses 19. (Currently Amended) The one or more processors of claim 14,
Denton discloses “Deep learning approaches have proven highly effective at discriminative tasks in vision, such as object classification” But does not disclose “wherein the circuitry is further to input the image generated by the one or more neural networks to one or more systems of an autonomous vehicle for object detection.”
Lee discloses “wherein the circuitry is further to input the image generated by the one or more neural networks to one or more systems of an autonomous vehicle for object detection.” (Lee, paragraph 31, ‘such as training a vision system for an autonomous vehicle”)
It would have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art before the time of the effective filing date of the claimed invention of the instant application to use the generated image to train object detection algorithm for any system including an autonomous vehicle system.
The suggestion/motivation for doing so would have been more data, equals to better trained Neural Network.
Further, one skilled in the art could have combined the elements as described above by known methods with no change in their respective functions, and the combination would have yielded nothing more than predictable results.
Therefore, it would have been obvious to combine Denton with Lee to obtain the invention as specified in claim 19.
Claim 24 is rejected under similar grounds as claim 19, where objection recognition is one type of navigation task.
Conclusion
Applicant's amendment necessitated the new ground(s) of rejection presented in this Office action. Accordingly, THIS ACTION IS MADE FINAL. See MPEP § 706.07(a). Applicant is reminded of the extension of time policy as set forth in 37 CFR 1.136(a).
A shortened statutory period for reply to this final action is set to expire THREE MONTHS from the mailing date of this action. In the event a first reply is filed within TWO MONTHS of the mailing date of this final action and the advisory action is not mailed until after the end of the THREE-MONTH shortened statutory period, then the shortened statutory period will expire on the date the advisory action is mailed, and any nonprovisional extension fee (37 CFR 1.17(a)) pursuant to 37 CFR 1.136(a) will be calculated from the mailing date of the advisory action. In no event, however, will the statutory period for reply expire later than SIX MONTHS from the mailing date of this final action.
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to GANDHI THIRUGNANAM whose telephone number is (571)270-3261. The examiner can normally be reached M-F 8:30-5PM.
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If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, Sumati Lefkowitz can be reached at 571-272-3638. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300.
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/GANDHI THIRUGNANAM/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2672
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